Case Summary
On January 31, 1969 at approximately 6:45 a.m., certified nursing assistant Gail Miller left her house in Saskatoon to catch a bus to work. This was the last time that she was seen alive. Hours later, Miller’s body was discovered one block south of her residence; she had been sexually assaulted and stabbed.1
That same morning, sixteen-year-old David Milgaard and two other young people, Ron Wilson and Nichol John, were on a road trip from Regina to Vancouver. Along the way, they planned to pick up David’s friend Albert Cadrain in Saskatoon.2 Upon arriving in the city, however, the youths got lost for several hours. Finally, at around 9:00 a.m., they arrived at Cadrain’s house, which was located only a short distance from where Miller’s body was found. Later that day, Cadrain joined Milgaard, Wilson, and Nichol as they continued their road trip, heading to Calgary.3
On March 2, 1969, some weeks after Milgaard and his friends had returned from the trip, Cadrain contacted Saskatoon police. He reported that he had seen blood on Milgaard’s clothing on the morning that Miller was killed. Cadrain suggested to police that Milgaard might have been the perpetrator.4
As a result, police brought Milgaard in for questioning; Wilson and John were later brought in as well. At first, Wilson and John told police that Milgaard had been with them at the time of the murder. Not satisfied with this rendition of events, police brought them back to be questioned on two further occasions. When subjected to a polygraph, Wilson changed his story and implicated Milgaard in the murder. John also changed her story before she could be subjected to a polygraph, stating that she had witnessed Milgaard stab Gail Miller.5
On May 30, 1969, Milgaard was arrested and charged with non-capital murder. At his trial, Nichol John did not adopt her earlier, incriminating statement; instead, she denied having seen Milgaard stab Miller. Nonetheless, the Crown read out her previous “eyewitness” statement to the jury. Milgaard was convicted on January 31, 1970 and sentenced to life in prison.6
The Saskatchewan Court of Appeal dismissed Milgaard’s appeal of his conviction. The Court ruled that the trial judge had not erred in permitting the Crown to read out John’s police statement, despite her subsequent recantation.7
In prison, Milgaard was physically abused and sexually assaulted. On several occasions, he tried to end his life. In 1980, he escaped for over two months, but was shot and recaptured by RCMP officers. But as the years unfolded, Milgaard and his mother, Joyce, refused to “give up the fight” for justice.8 Joyce Milgaard conducted her own investigations and ultimately uncovered that convicted rapist and attempted murderer Larry Fisher had been living in Cadrain’s basement at the time that Miller was killed.9 With this new information, David and Joyce Milgaard filed an application to the Minister of Justice in 1991, requesting a review of his conviction. Kim Campbell (who was then the Minister of Justice) denied his request; however, a second application was granted after Joyce Milgaard spoke directly to Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. Milgaard’s case was referred to the Supreme Court of Canada for determination of whether his conviction was a miscarriage of justice.10
The Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the new evidence placed before it “could reasonably be expected to have affected the verdict of the jury” at Milgaard’s trial.11 The Court concluded that his conviction should be set aside and a new trial take place.12 In April 1992, after 23 years in prison, Milgaard was finally freed.13
Rather than prosecute Milgaard again – or formally recognize his innocence – the Province of Saskatchewan chose to stay the proceedings against him. Subsequently, Milgaard sued the Crown and police officers involved in his wrongful conviction. In a letter to the Saskatchewan Minister of Justice, he enclosed his statement of claim, requesting that the Minister order a public inquiry and consider compensating him for his wrongful conviction. Ultimately, the Government of Saskatchewan agreed to pay $10 million in compensation.14
In 1997, DNA testing was performed on semen samples that had been found on Miller’s clothing. The DNA matched that of Larry Fisher, not David Milgaard. That same year, the Government of Saskatchewan apologized to Milgaard for his wrongful conviction, and on September 9, 2004, it “acknowledged that he was factually innocent of the charge that he murdered Gail Miller.”15
A Commission of Inquiry, led by the Honourable Mr. Justice Edward MacCallum, was commenced in 2004 to investigate the causes of Milgaard’s wrongful conviction. The Inquiry found that Albert Cadrain, who had tipped off police to Milgaard’s purportedly suspicious behaviour, was a paid police informant: he had received a $2,000 reward for his claim that Milgaard arrived at his house “in a nervous state” on the morning of the murder, “with blood on his trousers and shirt, which he changed for other garments.”16
Cadrain, who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, later stated that he was pressured by law enforcement into incriminating Milgaard, to the extent that he recalled his dealings with police as “mental hell and torture.”17 He described this experience as taking a “significant toll” on him particularly since the police had treated Cadrain, too, as a suspect in connection with the Miller homicide.18 The Inquiry did not find that Cadrain was in fact subject to police coercion, nor did it accept that he had shown signs of mental illness at the time that he gave his statement.19 This said, the Inquiry received evidence that Cadrain’s stated reason for contacting police was that he had had hallucinations of the Virgin Mary stepping on a snake with Milgaard’s face.20
The Inquiry further found that had it not been for the police interrogation of Ron Wilson and Nichol John, Milgaard would not have been convicted, nor indeed even charged.21 The youths had initially stated that Milgaard had an alibi, since they were in his presence at the time of the murder; however, they had each changed their stories dramatically over the course of interrogation, culminating in John’s statement that she had seen Milgaard stab Miller. The Inquiry found that the detective who interrogated John had pressured her into telling him what he believed to be the truth.22 While the Inquiry was unsympathetic to Wilson’s claims of police coercion, there was evidence before it that he was experiencing drug withdrawal after a two-day interrogation, and finally told police what they wanted to hear so as to put an end to this ordeal.23 The Inquiry expressed skepticism of Wilson’s account, but acknowledged the possibility that he had been detained for a lengthy period.24
Finally, the Inquiry found that in 1980, Larry Fisher’s ex-wife Linda had gone to the police station to report her suspicions that Fisher had killed Gail Miller. She told police that a paring knife had gone missing from their kitchen on the date of the homicide.25 The Inquiry found that police should have acted on this information, but failed to do so because Linda Fisher had made these statements at 4:00 a.m. after she had been drinking and had given a description of the missing knife that seemed not to match the murder weapon. Had police followed up on her report, they might have identified the true perpetrator of the Miller homicide well over a decade earlier.26
Milgaard died in May 2022, having spent decades advocating for prison reform and on behalf of other wrongfully convicted persons. He always credited his mother for succeeding in clearing his name.27